Daniel,

You will never read this, and that is exactly why I can finally write it.

I think about your hands. Specifically the thing you do where you put one flat on my back when we cross a street, like I'm about to bolt into traffic, like I'm something worth steering safely to the other side. You've done it maybe four hundred times. I've counted none of them and remembered all of them.

Out loud I'm cool about us. I make the jokes. I roll my eyes when you go soft on me. I have never once told you the actual size of the thing, because I have this stupid private fear that if I say it at full volume I'll jinx it, that naming a good thing out loud is exactly how you lose it.

So I'm putting it here instead, where it can be true without being dangerous. I am not waiting for my real life to start somewhere up ahead. It started. It's you in the kitchen doing that low humming you don't know you do. It's you stealing the good pillow. It's the exact weight of your arm when you're already asleep and I'm not.

I could take the slow version of you for the next fifty years and call it a life well spent.

One day my nerve will catch up to my heart and I'll say all of it to your face. Until then it lives in here, at full volume, where it's safe.